No bar on arresting Asaram: Supreme court

The Supreme Court has refused to grant relief to Asaram Bapu, the so-called spiritual leader from Gujarat who sought a restraint on the state police from arresting him in an attempt to murder case. Raju Chandok, an estranged disciple of Asaram, was shot at and injured in Ahmedabad by two motorcycle-borne men on December 5.

A bench of justices Altamas Kabir and Deepak Verma rejected a plea by Asaram’s lawyer Sushil Kumar seeking a direction to the police not to take any coercive step against the self-styled guru till a Special Leave Petition (SLP) filed by him comes up for hearing in January. “We will not pass any such order,” the court said and fixed January 4 for hearing the SLP.

Asaram said he is being falsely implicated and offered an alibi that he was delivering a religious discourse in New Delhi at the time of the attack.

Raju Chandok had testified against Asaram before the DK Trivedi Commission investigating the mysterious death of Dipesh and Abhishek Vaghela, two boys at Asaram’s ashram. The panel was set up after the students’ mysterious death in Ahmedabad in July last year. However, seven of the ashram staff got temporary reprieve when the high court stayed a police probe into the deaths.

The staff had approached the HC seeking quashing of an FIR filed against them in connection with the deaths.